Enclose in quotation marks any wording that is not your own
If you find in writing a paraphrase that you want to use wording from the original source, make sure that you enclose it in quotation marks. It should be clearly distinguished from your own wording and be properly documented. (See p. 692 for information on how to document sources.)
Summarizing
If you want to highlight only the most important details of a passage, summarize. Unlike quotations or paraphrases, summaries should not include details. Instead, summaries highlight the aspects of a source that are most important or most relevant to your argument. Keep your summaries short and focused, trim away any extraneous detail, and concentrate on what's most important. See, for example, how the following passage uses summaries to highlight and compare the main ideas from two texts:
Even liberal modern philosophers cannot agree with each other about our moral responsibility to the poor. On the one hand, in "Two Principles of Justice," John Rawls insists that a basic understanding of fairness requires us to distribute our resources in a way that everybody would see as fair if they viewed it from a neutral perspective (354). Garrett Hardin, on the other hand, believed that giving food, money, or other resources to poor people, especially those in less developed countries, is actually an immoral action. In "Lifeboat Ethics: The Case against Helping the Poor," Hardin argues that the earth's carrying capacity is limited and that it is unfair to allow people to exceed this capacity by having more children than the planet can support—thus placing everyone in danger (360).
Use your own words
Like a paraphrase, a summary by definition must be in your own words. Avoid using words and phrases similar to those in the source.
Indicate the source
Whenever you use or cite someone else's ideas, you need to credit them—even if the wording is entirely your own. For guidelines on documenting your sources in MLA and APA styles, see p. 692.
DOCUMENTING SOURCES
Whenever you use another's ideas or refer to a source in your writing, you need to provide documentation—identifying information—for your source. Plagiarism is any use of another person's idea without proper documentation. Whether it's intentional or not, plagiarism is an act of academic dishonesty that can have serious repercussions. Plagiarism includes (1) using the exact words of a writer without quotation marks, (2) using a writer's words, ideas, or both without an in-text citation or other form of documentation, and (3) paraphrasing or summarizing another writer's ideas by using the language or sentence structure of the original source. All of the following elements must be documented:
Ideas you have summarized or paraphrased from a source
It is plagiarism to summarize, paraphrase, or just use someone's ideas without attributing those ideas to their source. For examples of paraphrases and summaries, see pp. 688-89.
In the example from "Warfare: An Invention—Not a Biological Necessity" on p. 500, it would have been dishonest for the writer of the paraphrase to take credit in any way for the basic idea of Mead's essay: that warfare is an invention that spread from culture to culture rather than an inherent element of the human condition. Any idea that you borrow from another source must be attributed to that source, even if all the writing is your own.
Visuals that you did not create—photographs, tables, charts, graphs, and so on—must also be cited. If the visuals are ones you created, make sure that you acknowledge the work as your own.
Facts that are not considered common knowledge
In the middle of "Warfare: An Invention—Not a Biological Necessity," Margaret Mead writes that the Andaman pygmies living in the Bay of Bengal had a knowledge of organized warfare long before they ever encountered Europeans or other more technologically sophisticated societies. Even if you use this fact in another context (say in an essay about the organization of pygmy tribes), you must still cite Mead as the basis for this information, because it is not what scholars call "common knowledge."
In this context, "common knowledge" refers to the kind of information that is generally known or that is easily available in reference works. For example, the facts that the Andaman Islands are in the Bay of Bengal and that the native inhabitants of these islands are pygmies can be readily found in reference books and online, making them part of the pool of general knowledge. You would not need to cite Mead (or anyone else) as your source for these facts.
Approaches or organizational strategies borrowed from a source
Creating interesting, subtle frameworks for discussing ideas is one of a writer's most important skills. If, in searching for such a framework, you borrow from someone else's work, you must acknowledge it. Imagine, for example, that, in searching for a way to compare Machiavelli's The Prince and de Pizan's Treasure of the City of Ladies, you came across a website comparing them as "political theories," "cultural theories," and "theories of history." If you used these three categories in your own essay, you would need to acknowledge the website as your source—even if your actual comparisons did not borrow at all from the original source.
Anyone who has helped you develop your ideas
Whenever you collaborate with other people on your writing, make sure you give them proper credit. (Keep in mind that your instructor might not allow collaboration of any kind, in which case the ideas that you come up with must be entirely your own.) Contributions from other students, professors, colleagues, friends, and family should be acknowledged either in the body of the text or in a footnote or an endnote that explicitly gives credit where it is due. A note such as "Thanks to Dr. Mary Johnson of the Department of Psychology for her contribution to my understanding of Freud's concept of the ego" can be placed either at the end of an essay or at the point in your argument where the relevant discussion occurs.
DOCUMENTATION STYLES
Different academic disciplines use several different styles to document sources. Two common styles for undergraduate writing are the Modern Language Association (MLA) style and the American Psychological Association (APA) style. Before writing an essay, determine which style your instructor prefers and refer to an official style guide for detailed instructions on using that style. The guidelines that follow are not a replacement for a style manual, which provides much more detail on different kinds of documentation.
MLA Style
This style originated for the discussion of literature and is currently used in many humanities disciplines. MLA format places a minimal amount of information in an in- text citation and puts full bibliographical citations at the end on a Works Cited page.
In-Text Documentation
When you cite another source in your own writing, place enough information in parentheses for the reader to locate the source on your Works Cited page. If you have already identified your source, put the page number in parentheses immediately after the citation. Place the parentheses after the closing quotation marks but before the period:
According to civil rights leader Martin Luther King, a law is unjust if it "is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself " (435).